Seeing both sides of the story

With Letters from Iwo Jima Clint Eastwood completes his diptych presenting the famous WWII siege and defense of the strategic Japanese island from US and Japanese points of view. Since the two films are meant to comment on each other, it's misguided of some critics to say Letters is disproportionately superior to its predecessor, Flags of Our Fathers. We need both. Seeing the war from both sides is radical, even if some of the statements made, especially in the second film, are conventional. And an American film made in Japanese about Japanese soldiers must be pretty unusual.

Apart from the difference that the Japanese were defending a losing position and the well-equipped Americans were on the march, the two films approach their subjects with different aims. Flags of Iwo Jima exposes the ad-campaign falsification of warfare by honing in on the way the iconic flag-planting photo was used. The approach of Flags seems especially relevant to Americans in this day of big media manipulation and elective war. There’s also plenty of breathtaking battle footage, especially surrounding the medic played by Ryan Phillippe, but this is an unusual kind of war film, with its ironic contrasts of heroic promotional images with the grim memories of the actual combat.

Letters has personal digressions but its main focus is combat throughout. Officers (Ken Watanabe, Tsuyshi Ihara, Shido Nakamujra, Hiroshi Watanabe and others) and footsolodiers (Kazunari Ninomiya, Yuki Matsuzuki and others) are seen from setup on the island to defeat there. The letters come in voiceovers, and a cache of them is seen being found much later, having been buried by the omnipresent Saigo, a young baker with a pregnant wife back at home. Saigo's importance in the film is a victory for the little guy. He's not especially brave or anything but his sheer survival leads the general to call him "a good soldier." Among the higher ups, there's much attention to conflicting outlooks on how the defense should be mounted and, as defeat approaches, how individual soldiers ought to behave.

Unlike the Americans, the Japanese went to war fully expecting to die, and conditioned to believe it noble to do so. Since their situation is already beginning to appear hopeless, that viewpoint is not unfitting. Ironically they seem far more formidable at the early stages of the American siege seen in Flags than they do in the second film: their emplacements are high and concealed, and the Yanks can’t get at them or even spot them at first. But the Japanese in Letters from Iwo Jima see themselves as trapped in “caves,” and when they can’t get reinforcements, they are doomed. The conflict is between traditional soldiers or officers who simply want to stay and die nobly, and the more modern and American-oriented general Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) who wants defeated units to regroup in new locations.

Letters from Iwo Jima was based in part on a book of found letters, but written in collaboration with Paul Haggis by a Japanese-American, Iris Yamashita. Except for brief dialogue with a doughboy prisoner from Oklahoma, the film is entirely in Japanese, but perhaps understandably the screenplay "cheats" on us by weaving American points of view into the story in ways that would be unlikely were this a strictly Japanese production. The lieutenant general has fond memories of time spent in the US, and he chooses to move defeated units to new locations on the island, opposing more traditional officers who want to stay in place and die. Likewise the Joe-soldier character, little baker boy Saigo (played winningly by pop star Ninomiya) is horrified when, convinced that their position is lost, half a dozen members of his unit blow themselves up with grenades in an improvised version of Japanese ritual suicide. He, as the general would wish, moves to a new location. And Saigo is the ultimate survivor. He's not noble; with his pregnant wife to go back to and support, he's just the symbol of life going on when war is over.

The strongest moment in the film, perhaps, in taking an unexpected point of view, is when an American soldier does something quite dastardly to one of the Japanese soldiers we’ve come to know. Except for that chilling moment, it would be difficult to forget this is an American movie, however original it is to make a film about the Japanese experience.

In the end, this isn’t really an anti-war diptych, though its view is a mature and disenchanted one as befits the work of a seventy-five-year-old director who’s been playing stern heroes for decades. War seen here is a profoundly ironic affair full of moral conflict in which duty and principles are forever out of sync. It’s spelled out at the end of Letters through the somewhat over-explicit, but nonetheless effective moment when the general translates a letter from the Oklahoma prisoner’s mother, that people are people, and Saigo says he’s realized the Yanks weren’t evil brutes as they were told. And war is hell. The soldiers get fed up with it.

But when soldiers behave nobly and bravely, is that an anti-war message? For me a more effective anti-war film is Bernard Wicki’s 1959 Die Brücke, because there the adolescent German platoon at the end of the war is so clearly canon fodder: not much of a chance for bravery and when there is any it’s foolish. “War is hell” isn’t an original or an especially pacifistic angle. Maybe it’s only by seeing narratives of a particular war in a large context that this stance can emerge clearly. In that sense it was essential for Eastwood to tell the story in English and Japanese and he’s approached an understanding that the creation of an “enemy” is a manipulation of the people by the powers that be. Letters is conventional, but in both films Eastwood has done something original. He may not have achieved greatness, but he has maintained high quality, and the double-barreled approach is impressive and achieves something of a revisionist look at WWII.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.